Four years ago, Sylvia Gonzalez, a newly elected member of the Castle Hills, Texas, city council, was charged with concealing a government record, a misdemeanor that would have resulted in her removal from office if she had been convicted. Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales declined to pursue the case, and it is not hard to see why. The charge, which was orchestrated by Gonzalez's political opponents, was based on what she describes as an honest mistake: After a city council meeting, she says, she accidentally picked up a bundle of petitions against City Manager Ryan Rapelye—petitions that she herself had organized—and placed it in her binder along with other papers.
As a result, Gonzales was arrested two months later and spent a day in jail, after which her mug shot appeared in local news reports. According to a Supreme Court petition that the Institute for Justice filed on Gonzalez's behalf in April, "Gonzalez was so hurt by the experience and so embarrassed by the media coverage of her arrest" that "she gave up her council seat and swore off organizing petitions or criticizing her government." On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear her case, Gonzalez v. Trevino, which poses the question of what counts as "objective evidence" that someone was arrested in retaliation for constitutionally protected activity.
